GP's point is fair though. Many developed economies are spending literally hundreds of billions of dollars tackling COVID. Have we done proper cost/benefit analyses to verify whether that money could save or improve more lives in other areas?
Perhaps it's because these things can disrupt anyone's daily life seemingly at random. Pollution on the other hand is just part of our daily lives. There are other things which fall into that category as well such as smoking, fast food, alcohol, etc.
Perhaps we as a species, rightly or wrongly, fear the unexpected more than we fear the status quo, even if the latter is more harmful than the former. So we allocate resources to fix the former but not the latter.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto
I think a famous newspaper article at the time said something like: "Ford decided your life was worth $500". And it was after a cost benefit analysis.
Covid has a fatality rate of, at best, 0.3%. At worst, higher than 3%.
Nobody sane is going to sit still and let, say, 1% out of 8 billion people (80 million people!) die.
We can work on other issues in parallel, but prioritizing emergencies.
The current fatality rate is 1% despite it is only measured by testing the most severe cases which end up in hospital. How did you come up with 3%?
> “ Nobody sane is going to sit still and let, say, 1% out of 8 billion people (80 million people!) die.”
Latest science claims that we need 42% of a population to be infected to create herd immunity. Only this week we learned that slums in India (e.g in Mumbai) have reached herd immunity and are now the least affected in India where the rest of the country is struggling. 0.5-1% of 42% of 8 billion people (the expected number of deaths) is only twice as much as the yearly deaths from pollution.
Additionally pollution kills 7 million every year. A novel virus is novel only once, so after 2-3 years COVID cannot even reach the deaths caused by pollution even if we tried hard.
So overall it’s completely illogical why we respond to coronavirus with such draconian measures and at the same time are so blasé about pollution which is evidently more damaging overall.
If you are asking why humans as a species are not smarter than they are to see through short/long term effects, well, beats me :) But I still don't want my close ones to contract coronavirus, so I am still largely social-distancing. But I only hope to get an electric car in a couple of years.
Coal plants? Gone today. Electricity production reduced by 30-50% in most countries.
No ICE vehicles? I don't even know how many there are, but I'd imagine we're talking about 1 billion or more. Now that you're at it, goodbye trucking, taxis, 80% of public transportation, food delivery, ambulances, fire trucks, ...
No planes or helicopters? Goodbye emergency search and rescue, weather services, crop spraying, etc.
You haven't thought this through with your comparison ;-)